devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: managed service

  • VMware Drops Managed Cloud Onto Dell EMC Appliances

    VMware Drops Managed Cloud Onto Dell EMC Appliances

    At the Dell Technologies World conference, VMware today announced it will make available an instance of its managed cloud platform on appliances from Dell EMC in the second half of this year.

    VMware Cloud for Dell EMC is a turnkey platform that combines VMware compute, storage and networking software in a single offering managed and updated by VMware on behalf of its customers. It is similar to VMware Cloud for AWS, a managed service that VMware provides for Amazon Web Services, said Wei Wang, director of product marketing for VMware.

    VMware Cloud for Dell EMC represents the first commercial instance of Project Dimension, an initiative launched last year that promised to make available a software-defined data center (SDDC) as a managed service for on-premises IT environments in an effort to “ruthlessly automate IT.” In addition to supporting VxRail appliances from Dell EMC, VMware plans to make available instances of Project Dimension on other platforms, Wang said.

    Pricing for the managed service initially will be based on a flat monthly subscription, but Wang said VMware plans to provide a metered option that will enable customers to pay for VMware Cloud for Dell EMC on a pure consumption basis.

    In the meantime, VMware Cloud for Dell EMC, coupled with VMware Cloud for AWS, will provide IT organizations with a consistent control plane across a hybrid cloud computing environment based on vSphere, vSAN and NSX software that virtualizes compute, storage and networking, noted Wang. VMware is already managing infrastructure running more than 25 million workloads on AWS, a number that is expected to increase substantially as it rolls out instances on Project Dimension on additional public clouds including Microsoft Azure and on-premises IT environments.

    By opting to rely on VMware to manage IT infrastructure, organizations should be able to shift more of their own internal IT resources toward developing and deploying more applications. The VMware approach also potentially reduces the scope of the operational challenge many organizations now face when trying to manage virtual compute, storage and networking software in tandem.

    The challenge those organizations will face is implementing a set of best DevOps practices that match the cadence of the updates being made to the IT environment by VMware. It’s not clear to what degree organizations will want to relinquish operational control over IT infrastructure to VMware. Historically, roughly a quarter of all IT is consumed as a managed service usually provided by an IT services firm, but as vendors such as VMware begin to offer those managed services, the number of organizations that might switch to the model may increase.

    Many organizations already rely on cloud service providers such as AWS to manage infrastructure on their behalf. This latest offering essentially extends that same concept to on-premises IT environments.

    The degree to which organizations will save money by relying on a managed service is going to be difficult to quantify. In some cases, relying on a managed service might prove more expensive, while in other cases the savings on IT administrators alone might pay for the service. Whatever the path chosen, the number of workloads that will running on IT infrastructure managed by vendors such as VMware will increase sharply in the months and years ahead.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Adobe Strategy Revolves Around DevOps

    Adobe Strategy Revolves Around DevOps

    At the Adobe Summit 2019 conference this week, Adobe detailed that its Adobe Experience Cloud customer experience ecosystem is reliant on a set of best DevOps processes that is wrapped around a modern microservices architecture and layered on top of big data platform deployed on the Azure cloud.

    Adobe last year acquired Magento, provider of an e-commerce platform, and Marketo, provider of a marketing automation platform. Since then, Adobe has been working to integrate those offerings with its existing marketing application to create the Adobe Experience Cloud.

    Anjul Bhambhri, vice president of platform engineering for Adobe, said this set of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications are being integrated around a shared common data model that is layered on a microservices-based architecture of containers running on Kubernetes clusters. On top of that, Adobe is layering a series of machine learning algorithms, dubbed Sensei, to embed artificial intelligence (AI) across the entire portfolio, he said.

    As that work progresses, Adobe plans to allow customers and partners to leverage the data stored in the Adobe Experience Cloud to train their own AI models using data curated by Adobe, Bhambhri noted. That data model, known as the Experience Data Model (XDM), is also being shared with partners including Microsoft and SAP, which last year committed to an ambitious initiative to build a common data model in collaboration with Adobe. XDM makes use of open source Kafka messaging software to integrate the various data pipelines that are required to integrate these applications at scale in near real-time, Bhambhri said.

    Those efforts complement an existing initiative under which Adobe is exposing open application programming interfaces (APIs) to encourage developers to build applications that extend Adobe Experience Cloud.

    Rather than building their own customer data platforms, organizations can drive their digital business initiatives using a big data platform managed by Adobe on their behalf. Many organizations have been building their own platforms to achieve that goal with mixed success, first deploying a data warehouse on top of a big data platform and then working to integrate various applications to provide a richer digital customer experience. Bhambri noted Adobe is pouring considerable resources to obviate the need for organizations to acquire, deploy and manage their own IT infrastructure to achieve that goal.

    IT leaders must decide whether they want to reduce the time, money and effort required to build these custom platforms in favor of using a managed service from Adobe—which, arguably, would enable them to pour more resources into developing applications that, as a result, would come to market faster.

    In the meantime, it’s clear the need to embrace digital business transformation will drive more organizations to embrace DevOps processes. The question now is to what degree they need to define their own set of best DevOps processes versus simply lifting the DevOps best practices that organizations such as Adobe have already proven.

    — Mike Vizard